Nicola Sturgeon and Lee Child on Shuggie Bain
A-list fans celebrate the best-selling novel released during lockdown and already hailed as a modern classic
At times, Shuggie Bain can be hard reading. We are not spared but it took only a few pages for me to realise this is an exceptional novel.
The very best books are those able to evoke a distinctive and convincing sense of time and place. Shuggie Bain does so brilliantly.
Its depiction of some of the deeply painful experiences endured by Shuggie is made even more harrowing with the knowledge that this fictional young boy’s life is based to some degree on author Douglas Stuart’s own childhood.
Tomorrow, I am getting the chance to interview him and, as a book lover, it will be an absolute privilege.
I am an avid reader of fiction of all kinds but regardless of genre – crime, historical drama, whatever – if writers are able to convey a sense of authenticity about their plot and their characters then their stories will flow. Shuggie Bain achieves that because it is forged in personal experience and a depiction of Glasgow and Scotland in the 1980s that so many of us recognise from our own lives and memories.
That decade was a tough one for many people across Scotland, particularly in parts of the central belt where the effects of deindustrialisation were being felt. That is the backdrop to the book but the story of one family touches on the social and personal impact those wider changes had on so many people and communities.
As someone who was at school at the time and forming my own early political views, it is gripping, and unsettling in some ways, to be transported back to that period.
Shuggie Bain is a debut novel and for an author’s first work to be nominated for, let alone win, such an esteemed honour as the Booker Prize signals a very special book and a very special writer.
My chat with Douglas, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival tomorrow is the kind of opportunity I’ve missed over the last 18 months or so, as all our lives have been turned upside down. And, while we need to stay on our guard, especially with rising case numbers, I hope events like this can, and will, become more common in the months ahead.
It is, of course, for Douglas himself to say how much of his own life colours Shuggie Bain but his own story is an extraordinary one and he deserves the most enormous respect.
His journey has taken him from a difficult and disadvantaged childhood to a successful career in fashion and now life as a celebrated author in New York.
It is an inspirational, uplifting life story and I’m looking forward to learning more about it tomorrow.